Patrick Hanlon is recognized as one leading branding practitioners in the world. He is ceo and founder of THINKTOPIA®, a global brand and strategic innovation practice for Fortune 100 clients including American Express, Levis, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, Yum! Foods, Wrigley, PayPal, Gap, the United Nations and others. His book Primal Branding: Create Zealots For Your Brand, Your Company And Your Future was published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press and is listed as one of the Top 10 books in marketing and branding. Primal Branding® is the seminal book on brands as belief systems—and in 2006 anticipated creating social communities around brands, whether products and services, personality brands, political or civic movements, or actual civic communities.
Primal Branding is mandatory reading at YouTube, the largest social engagement platform on the planet, as their recommended construct for designing and attracting online social communities.
Hanlon’s new book The Social Code: Designing Community In The Digital Age defines how to create communities of advocates who become so passionate about your success, they are willing to create it themselves.
Hanlon has been a keynote or guest speaker at IDEO, HP Innovation Series, New York University, American Marketing Association, American Advertising Federation, Syracuse University, Urban Land Institute, and elsewhere. He has also been a featured speaker in emerging geographies including China, India, and South America.
Hanlon has been featured, quoted, or interviewed in Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc., Advertising Age, National Public Radio, CNBC, FOX and frequent overseas publications. Hanlon is listed as one of the Top 50 people to follow on Twitter, Top 50 Over 50 in Marketing, and is an online contributor for Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Medium and other publications.

Branding The (Un)Brand

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, writer (and fledgling psychotherapist) Lori Gottlieb bemoans her entry into the grim circus of capitalism. Recently graduated, she finds herself in a Manhattan market chockfull of psychotherapists (go figure). She must now, to her horror, figure out how to market herself. Gottlieb is surprised to learn that there are actually people to help her do that. But. “I couldn’t imagine hiring a branding consultant to lure people to the couch,” she writes. “Psychotherapy is perhaps one of the few commercial businesses that doesn’t see itself as one….Branding is the antithesis of what we [do].”

Gottlieb’s regard for branding, although a bit misguided, is not unusual. Universities, artistes, religious groups, and some professions reject the notion of being promoted, marketed, or attached to any sensibility akin to the dark arts of branding. Some even project a rabid antipathy for brands, or even suggest the end of Brands.

At a minimum, they reject and repel any sense of being brandwashed.

The gesture itself is an act of defiance against commercialism and any ideals identified with a logo. It may seem different, but even those who rally around that defiance have, in a sense, branded themselves. Popular Japanese brand Muji (the name literally means “no brand”), for example, sells to that group that sees itself as brand-less.

This notion (and Lori Gottlieb’s) springs from a simple misunderstanding of branding strategy and what brands are. So let’s clear that up. Brands are communities of people driven by a common belief. And insofar as a brand is nothing more than a community of people with shared beliefs, brands are still as relevant, as resonant, and as vital as ever.

No one is trying to trick us into buying something. There are no breasts in the ice cubes. No psychologically hidden messages buried in the soundtracks in TV adverts. Brands are a succinct impress of ideals, values, sensory cues, and experiences.

What (un)brands clumsily try to declare is that brands have outlived their purpose and no longer matter. Not so fast. Brands are backed by popular consent. No matter if they are cult brands, tribal brands, love brands, global brands, or local brands, insofar as they are communities of people drawn together by a central ideal, they are brands. Just as Apple, Lady Gaga, Nike, are corporate brands. Just as Threadless, Black Label Bike Club, and Brooklyn are brands. Just as concepts like global warming, locavorism, and OWS have communities of support, they become branded ideas. Just as “U.S.A.” is a brand.

Each of these entities have core principles, icons, rituals, a specialized vocabulary they use to describe themselves, a paradoxical ideal they struggle against, as well as a founding mythos and leader.

In other words, the building blocks of community and Brand.

Brands are consensual communities driven by a core belief system that attracts others who share those beliefs. People can opt-in or opt-out of the brand: participate (or not) in community engagements and/or experiences. (It is the accumulated engagement of shared experiences that stimulates and builds feelings of “Brand”.) And modern brands must necessarily be engaged in the accordion fold of social conversations.

We might wonder why. As human beings, we have a primal instinct to instantaneously profile people, the weather, inanimate objects, and situations. Our brains are instinctively hard-wired to tell us whether we should approach or avoid. Our brains are also hard-wired to bring human beings together to form protective groups and clans. If we are hard-wired to be communal, as scientists claim, then we are also hard-wired to accept brands.

Is Burning Man a curious annual Happening that draws thousands of men, women and children to a sacred space in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada, or is it a Brand? Yes. And yes. Its functional status is as a spiritual and recreational space. But Burning Man is also a brand that radiates with sacred rites, treasured icons, shared values, soul yearning, creative endeavor, and its own lexicon and leadership. The event reminds us of what we might become and what we can never be. Its power as a brand community allows its values to be spread across interdisciplinary media including film and video, coffee table books, journals, blogs, magazine articles, tweets, and personal narrative.

A brand is a mutuality of consent. A promise of trust and shared values. A common regard. Because we share the same values, ideas or interests, we agree to be together. In one of the most advanced technological and consumerist eras of humankind, we gather around the primal fire of the burning man. Counter culture meets counterculture.

Social scientists suggest that we are hard-wired to be communal, to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Again, why? It has been demonstrated again and again that those who shop Thanksgiving Night do not particularly pick up bargains someone shopping at 3PM Black Friday afternoon wouldn’t find. What provokes us to join the horde? In our commercialized society, low-end estimates suggest that by the time we turn eighteen, we have been bombarded by (at minimum) 14 million advertising impressions. (High end estimates might put that at 14 billion.) So perhaps it has become second nature for us to parenthetically aspire to the hope of something new, different, the next wonderful thing. The tillers of commerce—design, innovation, technology, manufacturing, and resources—create continual expectations and the steady drip of dopamine tickles us forward. In ways that are simultaneously physical, emotional, and spiritual, we have learned to desire desire.

This helps us in a gentle unfolding of the question, what is brand strategy?

If we are dependent upon anything in modern consumerist society, it is our What’s Next? manifest destiny that keeps our eyes peeled for the horizon line, seeking out the next shiny shiny object and (mostly) ignoring our past, which is so last season.

The desire by some to rethink and reject those values and try to snap the physical and emotional dependency for desire—is perhaps laudable. But it is important to remember that even as that paradoxical notion builds and creates a community of support it, too, becomes a brand.

Even if that thought seems to be, at least in the beginning, (un)thinkable.

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